


Are You

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Experimental, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:22:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24856009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Are you protector? Are you teeth bared, fists out, knuckles bloody? Are you destroy everything in your path for love of him? Are you shelter-seeker, bloody teeth, bruised knuckles made for fighting, are you ache are you want are you ruined a thousand ways because you were made just for him.Meditations on a childhood, if you could call it that.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30





	Are You

**Author's Note:**

> I get to thinking about things sometimes. Certain fics are born out of a fixation, out of a point in time and my desire to clarify my own thoughts within it in the best way I know how. The fic I wrote when my grandpa died was one of those. This is another. It's less a narrative than an ice bath, probably. Happy Father's Day to us.

There are two boys. They're the same age, give or take. One is provider, shelterer, champion. One is small, is anger, is port in a storm. It's just like any magic eye poster you've ever seen. Just a trick of the light, squint your eyes and a new way of seeing.

You’re barely old enough to reach the stove, grasping at handles way above your head. You’re carefully trying to heat up a can of Campbell’s soup, nearly cutting the pads of your fingers on the sharp edges. You wait until it starts to burn, stuck-on noodles starting to smell like char. You don’t stir because you can’t reach.

You grab the handle in shaky little-boy hands, nearly sloshing the boiling liquid all over your pretty face. You don’t know enough to know how close you almost came to pain, to fire, to burning, to knowing a little better how your mother felt when she screamed.

If your mom was here, she’d scold you, face gone white with fright. She’d gentle you when you cried, confused and scared because you were _just trying to help._ Your brother was crying. He was crying cause he was hungry, and this is what you do.

Six years old and you’re already a fixer.

She’d gentle you with a cookie, with a kiss to the forehead, with a little tug on your ear to make you giggle. She’d tell you it’s okay and breathe in the warm scent of your sweet hair, then make your brother something soft and cool because two year olds don’t eat chicken noodle soup.

She would, but. Well.

There’s only you so you get the soup into a bowl standing on a chair. You only burn yourself a little. Your dad doesn’t scold you because your dad isn’t here.

Sammy doesn’t eat it because two year olds don’t eat soup. He cries and he cries, and you, white-faced, burnt-knuckled, you suck your fingers into your mouth to stop the burning and you throw the soup into the trash, and your eyes water but you don’t cry because big boys don’t do that.

*

There are two boys. One is father, one is protector, one is reason for living. Which is which only depends on which way you squint—what's your bias, kid? What's the world look like from where you're sitting?

Are you protector? Are you teeth bared, fists out, knuckles bloody? Are you destroy everything in your path for love of him? Are you shelter-seeker, bloody teeth, bruised knuckles made for fighting, are you ache are you want are you ruined a thousand ways because you were made just for him.

It's a magic puzzle, and there's no answer.

Are you brilliant in school are you fighting demons inside as well as out, night after night are you not enough, ruined shelter, accident of birth

Maybe you’re this one. This one after a fight, the one who curls up in bed, curls up tight around a lodestone of anger because the only thing worse than being treated like this is knowing that you’ll forgive this too.

You’re helpless against the tidal pull of shared blood, genetically predisposed to love him, to offer your bloody belly and soft throat no matter how many times it’s torn out. You’re not stupid, you know what it’s called, know how it ends

You fall asleep with swollen eyes, with salt-stung skin, with gasping breath.

Your brother doesn’t say anything because there are two sides in this house, and he’s never on yours. You could hold it against him. You could but you can’t because you need one ally, just the one. If you’re mad at him, then you’re mad at everyone and you can’t afford to be alone against the world, small thing that you are.

You are. You’re mad at everyone. You’re made of anger, of grit inside skin but you’ll agree to forget it for him. Just for him.

For the rest, you promise to remember. You promise that you’ll never forgive, no matter how much you want to, because it’s the one thing you can do for yourself, the one good thing.

*

There are two boys. One of them has a forgotten birthday. Again. The other has no money, no presents, open hands with bloody knuckles trailing love on the floor.

There are a million, million ways to tell this story. They’re all true, for a given value of true. You laugh off the birthday, swear that you don’t need it. You’re at that age where you’re pretty sure you’re gonna live forever, all evidence to the contrary aside.

Most teenagers don’t see death up close and personal, _visceral_ in every sense of the word. Don’t smell the leaking guts of something they knifed, something with their blood coating its sharp teeth. You smelled her flesh burn, you know about death. So it’s funny that you didn’t get much of a childhood, not the way most people mean, but you did get this, this laughing in the face of death, this bright-burning, live-forever cynicism.

You won’t realize it until much later, picture-perfect in the rearview decades from now when you’re somehow, miraculously still breathing. Right now you’re too young for context. Too old to care.

For now there’s just a ruined birthday, a smashed candy bar that you find forgotten in a pair of dirty jeans, the only sweetness you’ll get out of this whole rotten fucking day, and you still, still give it to your brother.

He’s an ungrateful little shit, but his smile still lights up your whole world, so you guess it’s alright. You’re gonna live for fucking ever anyway.

*

Hell is other people, but it’s also just hell. Hell, angels, holy war, trickster gods, actual God, bullshit fucking redemption. It all comes out in the wash. There’s two boys, fuck it.

*

There are two boys who grew up. One has Father's Day card, has jackal smile, has twisted heart has ruined fucking definition of love, and the other is his match. Pick your poison, choose your side.

It's only a trick of the light. The definition only matters in translation.

**Author's Note:**

> Always happy to say what's up on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


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